“Everybody has the wrong information,” a woman in the audience told the board late Tuesday night. “How are we supposed to trust you?”

It appears the gaffe was the result of a clerical error rather than subterfuge: The correct contracts actually reflect a voluntary $9,600-a-year pay cut. That’s because interim Superintendent Bob Cox and his two cabinet members have eliminated their own car and cellphone stipends that they have received in the form of automatic monthly payments of $800.

The stipends are a controversial legacy of Fernandez, who is under investigation for his hefty pay, which ranged from $663,000 to $750,000 last year. The board, which put Fernandez on paid leave a month ago pending the outcome of multiple investigations, revoked his paid status Tuesday night, citing their review of the probes underway.

Under the Fernandez administration, all managers were granted some form of the automatic payments. Elected school board members also received the $800-a-month allowances until early April, when the Los Angeles County Office of Education ordered the district to stop the payments.

The move by Cox and the cabinet to do away with their monthly allowances could portend a similar cutback for the rest of the district’s management staff.

“We felt we needed to look at the stipends that were offered in the district, and, before we could take action on any other employee stipends, we felt we needed to set a good example,” Cox said Wednesday. “So we voluntarily removed those.”

But the audience had no way of knowing this, because the contracts that were made available showed that the long-controversial stipends of $800 a month were still included. When an audience member approached the board to complain about the allowances, she was stopped by member Gloria Ramos, who said the contract was an old version that should not have been handed out.

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“Incorrect versions of the contract were copied and made available,” Ramos said. “Most of these incorrect copies were retrieved.”

After a flurry of apologies from board members and administrators alike — and after an administrative assistant scrambled to make the correct contracts available — the board later approved the new contracts.

Some of the roughly 20 people who stuck around until past 11 p.m. to comment on the contracts say their frustration was exacerbated by how the contracts were among a batch of controversial or high-dollar matters buried at the tail end of the agenda for a meeting that stretched on for seven hours.

These included more than $750,000 worth of unanticipated extra costs — also known as change orders — requested by the district’s construction management company, TELACU, on behalf of three contractors. Swinerton Builders asked for $432,851 for its project at Lawndale High, Turner Construction requested $162,623 for “additional scope of work” at Leuzinger High and McCarthy Building Cos sought $160,210 for the same at Hawthorne High.

“Last month it was $374,000, this time it’s $755,000 — why?” asked Hawthorne resident Regina Dinnel. “You probably should have done this when all the public was here. Again, you guys waited until everybody was gone.”

TELACU representative John Clem later addressed the board, saying that the change orders are all within budget and fall within the scope of industry norms.

“All three of these projects will be under budget,” he said. “These are three of the largest construction companies building schools in the nation.”

He added: “TELACU doesn’t make a penny on change orders.”

As for the employment contracts, the elimination of the stipends essentially reduced the annual pay of Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services Allan Mucerino by $9,600, to $160,471.

For Assistant Superintendent of Business Services Ron Hacker, it’s more complicated. He, too, has done away with the stipends, but on Tuesday he became the last of the three top administrators to receive the same 4.1 percent raise that teachers were granted in February, reflecting a standard practice in the district to raise the salaries of teachers and administrators at the same rate.

Cox, who also still serves as the district’s assistant superintendent of human resources, will draw a salary of $180,871 for as long as he is the interim leader.

Here is how his pay breaks down.

Prior to his appointment as interim superintendent, Cox received the same compensation as Mucerino: a base salary of about $160,000, plus the $9,600-a-year in the automatic allowances for cellphone and auto use. Elimination of the stipend reduces Cox’s compensation back to $160,000 as head of human resources. But Cox’s new contract also calls for him to receive $85 a day for performing his extra duties as interim superintendent.

(Further fueling the suspicion of board critics was how the incorrect contracts for the three administrators listed their base-pay amounts from two years ago, creating the impression that the stipends weren’t being cut, but instead were being absorbed into their new base pay, Cox said.)

On Tuesday night, teachers union President Jack Foreman — who was re-elected to the post last week — said while he believes the district is moving in the right direction, the membership wants to see a concerted effort to recruit a permanent superintendent.

“Everyone wants to see a superintendent search happen, and very soon,” he said. “Today you took the first step in putting Fernandez out the door. However, we need to get this process going, and the teachers need to see evidence this isn’t going to drag on.”

Tuesday’s meeting went long largely because of a state-mandated public hearing on how best to spend state dollars under a sweeping new state funding formula that shifts considerably more resources to districts serving large disadvantaged populations. State law requires the hearing to be held during a regular board meeting. During the hearing, the presenter, Mucerino, took pains to answer all questions from the audience — even ones that were shouted from the seats.

“Nobody here is saying anything that I don’t value,” he said at one point. “I’ve been listening to you here at these board meetings. ... Kids cannot be disposable, it’s as simple as that.”

In a notable departure from the tone of recent meetings in Centinela, the audience applauded.